Clusium

“ Upon this the Etruscans fled, knowing that ultimate victory would not be theirs. This is not the way that a modern army would have acted. Valerius returned to Rome in triumph, and the matrons mourned Brutus as the avenger of Lucretia, an entire year.
This is the time of heroes and of highly ornamented lays, and we are not surprised to find truth covered up beneath a mass of fulsome bombast. It is related that Tarquinius now obtained the help of Prince or Lars Porsena of Clusium in Etruria, and with a large army proceeded undisturbed quite up to the Janiculum Hill on his march to Rome. ”

“ The chief family names of the Fabian gens or clan, in republican times, were Vibulanus, Ambustus, Maximus, Buteo, Pictor, Dorso, Labeo; with surnames Verrucosus, Rullianus, Gurges, Aemilianus, Allobrogicus (all of the Maximus branch) . The most important members of the family are the following:—
1. Marcus Fabius Ambustus, pontifex maximus in the year of the capture of Rome by the Gauls (390) . His three sons, Quintus, Numerius and Caeso, although they had been sent as ambassadors to the Gauls when they were besieging Clusium, subsequently took part in hostilities (Livy v. 35) . ”

“ Therefore, if weakness bid me curse and die,
I answer, No! I will not curse myself,
Nor aught beside; I shall not die, but live.
Eve. Ah me! alas! alas!
More dismally in my face stares the doubt,
More heavily on my heart weighs the world.
Methinks
The questionings of ages yet to be,
The thinkings and cross-thinkings, self-contempts,
Self-horror; all despondencies, despairs,
Of multitudinous souls on souls to come,
In me imprisoned fight, complain and cry.
Alas!
Mystery, mystery, mystery evermore. Scene II.
Adam, alone.
Adam. Misery, oh my misery! O God, God! ”

“ You see, dear sir, the thing which it is attempted to represent is the conflict between the tender conscience and the world. Now, the over-tender conscience will, of course, exaggerate the wickedness of the world; and the Spirit in my poem may be merely the hypothesis or subjective imagination formed—'
'Oh, for goodness' sake, my dear boy,' interrupted my uncle, 'don't go into the theory of it. If you're wrong in it, it makes bad worse; if you're right, you may be a critic, but you can't be a poet. ”

“ It is incredible—dreamlike. Is it real, or is it only a great delusion?"
"It is real," she said; "if you dare."
"After all, like all kingship, my kingship is Belief. It is an illusion in the minds of men." ”

“ How could those primitive men, living so near the Fountain-head of revelation, conversing with those who had witnessed the rise and first development of man's marvellous history, endowed with that quick, intuitive science which, in the operations of external nature, revealed to them the agency of invisible spirits, witnessing the wondrous manifestations of God's love and power, the active ministry of his messengers of light; and, lastly, engaged themselves in a close communication with the infernal powers; how could they, I say, fall into atheism or any other species of speculative unbelief? ”

“ And hardly tasking, subtly questioning,
Another spirit went around the ring
To each and each: and as he ceased his say,
Each after each, I heard them singly sing,
Some querulously high, some softly, sadly low,
We know not, what avails to know?
We know not, wherefore need we know?
This answer gave they still unto his suing,
We know not, let us do as we are doing.
Dost thou not know that these things only seem?
I know not, let me dream my dream.
Are dust and ashes fit to make a treasure? ”

“ Dark and gloomy, too, perhaps, in its future prospects, appears the long struggle between divine truth and human discord, between light and darkness, between faith and infidelity. But the more difficult and intricate the problem is which forms the theme of our present disquisition, the more diligently and the more conscientiously ought we to seek out and dwell upon every bright and quiet spot. ”

“ In this respect it may be regarded as the vestibule of that temple of freedom which in man, the crowning work of this earthly creation, and made after the divine image and likeness, stands forth in its full dimensions and proportions. Considered from another point of view, the sensible world may be looked upon as a veil thrown over the spiritual world—the light-flowing and almost transparent robe, and, as it were, in all its parts the significant costume of the invisible powers. ”

“ For all these various significations of true and false illumination, the eighteenth century in its real or pretended enlightenment may furnish us with historical proofs. Thus without misapprehending or disowning that true and divine light visible even in the progress of science, or without rejecting, or contracting in too narrow bounds the salutary and necessary light of human reason, still we must be careful to distinguish from the former the light which is illusive, or changeable, as well as that which is spurious, and counterfeited by the powers of darkness. ”

“ Reason and imagination, which are now in such frequent collision with the will and understanding, as well as with each other, would then have been absorbed in those higher faculties. Even the conscience would not then have been a special act, or special function of the judgment—but a tender feeling—a gentle, almost unconscious pulsation of the soul. ”

“ How was the earth to recapture its love again, and drink back into itself its rapture and creativeness? By a marriage in which God and the Universe were made one flesh; by the incorporation of God into Life, and, therefore, into Man. Hence arose the Pantheism of the Renaissance. ”

“ With this view, I venture to assert that the human consciousness, which otherwise and in itself is entirely a prey to discord, and split into irreconcilable contraries, is, by faith, hope, and love, redeemed from this dissension—is raised from its innate law, of an erring and dead thought, and of an absolute will, which is no less dead and null, being restored gradually to a perfect state of unison and harmony. ”

“ Instinctive nobility, instinctive taste, methodic research, the genius of organisation and administration, faith, the will to the future of mankind, the great yea to all things materialised in the imperium Romanum, become visible to all the senses, grand style no longer manifested in mere art, but in reality, in truth, in life.—And buried in a night, not by a natural catastrophe! ”

“ The cloister gives way to the open court; the inspired ones are seeking the roads which may lead out from hazy, unproven cloud-land into the brightness of the everyday, practical life which the world must have experience of, along all lines, among all classes, high and low, ignorant and learned, ere it can dislodge the incubus of superstition, and undevelopment under which it has staggered along, through devious ways of despair and unbelief, to awaken at last to a realization of the final destiny of humanity. ”

“ But it is, at the same time, an occasion to recall to our conscience another faculty which is in us—a faculty which is even superior to the objects before which our imagination yields. In consequence, a sublime object, precisely because it thwarts the senses, is suitable with relation to reason, and it gives to us a joy by means of a higher faculty, at the same time that it wounds us in an inferior one. ”

“ Rome will be here, and the Pope the custode of Vatican marbles.
I have no heart, however, for any marble or fresco;
I have essayed it in vain; ’tis in vain as yet to essay it:
But I may haply resume some day my studies in this kind;
Not as the Scripture says, is, I think, the fact. Ere our death-day,
Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but Knowledge abideth.
Let us seek Knowledge;—the rest may come and go as it happens.
Knowledge is hard to seek, and harder yet to adhere to.
Knowledge is painful often; and yet when we know we are happy. ”

“ In the same way, in the next division of my speculations, the essential subject and proper aim will be to carry that feeling, call it as we will, whether of pure love, or inner life, or higher truth, whose existence we have, we think, clearly established, through the crisis of doubt, to a determinate judgment of profound certainty and unwavering conviction, or at least to a rigorous distinction between that which is certain and that which must forever remain uncertain. ”

“ We know that there is illusion,—not as to the reality of the visible, but as to its meanings,—very much illusion. Yet why should this illusion attract us, like some glimpse of Paradise?—why should we feel obliged to confess the ethical glamour of a civilization as far away from us in thought as the Egypt of Ramses? Are we really charmed by the results of a social discipline that refused to recognize the individual?—enamoured of a cult that exacted the suppression of personality? ”

“ Verily, if the vision of the Mediæval Soul is painful in its blind staring and pathetic striving, grotesque in its senseless tortures, the Soul of the Modern is most amazing with its restless, nervous eyes, ever searching the corners of the universe, its restless, nervous hands ever reaching and grasping for some useless toil. ”

“ All that a hierarchy of illusions can show is preference, not reality. What relevance has preference to the truth? Illusions are illusions and are false. Your preference gives them no reality. Not one is true in any way, and all must yield with equal ease to what God gave as answer to them all. God's Will is One. And any wish that seems to go against His Will has no foundation in the truth. ”

“ The assumption of the Syllogism is thus proved. It is the part of the same power to change the order of nature, and to create things that were not existent, and so the mutation of the order of nature is a certain kind of new creation. ”

“ Before the body of his work, so clear and lucid in its definition, so perfect in its organization, one thinks perforce of a world created out of the flying chaos beneath him by a god. We are given to know precisely of what stuff the soul of Debussy was made, what its pilgrimages were, in what adventure it sought itself out. ”

“ For there are two methods of divining; one dependent on art, the other on nature. But what nation is there, or what state, which is not influenced by the omens derived from the entrails of victims, or by the predictions of those who interpret prodigies, or strange lights, or of augurs, or astrologers, or by those who expound lots (for these are about to come under the head of art) ; or, again, by the prophesies derived from dreams, or soothsayers (for these two are considered natural kinds of divination) ? ”

“ To sum up: in treating of illusions we shall assume, what science as distinguished from philosophy is bound to assume, namely, that human experience is consistent; that men's perceptions and beliefs fall into a consensus. From this point of view illusion is seen to arise through some exceptional feature in the situation or condition of the individual, which, for the time, breaks the chain of intellectual solidarity which under ordinary circumstances binds the single member to the collective body. ”

“ Every species of theoretical or practical unbelief or erring faith, or even of a scientific superstition, either approximates, on the one hand, to naturalism, whether under the garb of a poetical symbolism, or the scientific form of a dynamical theory, or, on the other, to the absolutism of the reason, with its dead formularies. Every religious and every philosophical error is either a subordinate or a distorted species of one or the other—or, it may be, a mixture—a mean compounded of both. ”

“ Among the latter people at a tolerably early period, a sound, just Reason conformable and docile to divine revelation was superseded by an egotistical, subtle, over-refining Reason, which split into hostile sects, and at last subverted the old edifice of sacred Tradition, to re-construct it on a new revolutionary plan. ”

“ The inquiry then, whether the soul of man, gradually rising out of the depths of this perishable existence and the bondage of corruption, up to God, can approach nearer to, and finally be totally identified with Him; or at least, whether it is capable of being united in a perfect and lasting harmony with the superior powers of a higher and a diviner region—this will form the theme of our present disquisition. In discussing it, however, our attention will be directed principally to its psychological aspect—its relation, i.e., to the theory of consciousness. ”

“ In one view these lines may certainly be construed to import the same sentiment as the speech of the miserable Claudio in "Measure for Measure,"—
"The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature, is a paradise To what we fear of death." ”

“ Besides that sensual deification of nature, which was the predominant principle in the mythology and popular religion of the ancients, there was another and capital error—magic, which was a dark and abusive application—an illicit perversion of the high powers of nature, when these were really understood, and the mind, penetrating through her sensible and external veil, had caught her true spirit and internal life. ”

“ At the close of the nineteenth century he stood a picturesque and pathetic figure, combating with a mediæval eloquence the advancing spirit of his time, a representative of the lost age of faith lingering far into the new-found age of rationalism. ”